


catch the sound of your laughter

by Ryuutchi



Category: Come Back Home - 2NE1 (Music Video)
Genre: Artificial Intelligence, Dystopia, Femslash If You Tilt Your Head, Gen, Implied Murder, Misses Clause Challenge, Original Male Character - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-20
Updated: 2015-12-20
Packaged: 2018-05-07 21:59:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5472164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ryuutchi/pseuds/Ryuutchi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When they first plugged in, they thought it <i>was</i> paradise. But Dara misses when Paradise wasn't just Virtual.</p>
            </blockquote>





	catch the sound of your laughter

**Author's Note:**

  * For [aliceblue](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aliceblue/gifts).



> Thanks to Zeb for knocking this into shape.

catch the sound of your laughter

* * *

Bom tapped out another line of code on her holoscreen, watching the sectioned circles expand and contract, spitting out a formula in response. She slammed her hand down through the thin gaseous membrane, disrupting the image into a spate of colorful pixelated garbage. Muttering deprecations under her breath, she had to wait a moment for the gas to stabilize enough to act as platform for the holographic interface and the images to re-form. Her irritation was palpable throughout the laboratory, even without the purity of the sterilized atmosphere to amplify and carry her sigh.

“Still nothing?” Minzy barely glanced up from where she was pouring chemicals from one beaker to another. She tipped her head back to watch a plume of multi-colored smoke infused with the earlier batch of carefully-adjusted nutrient concoction swirl through the digitally-enhanced canopy of plants which covered the inside of their lab. It helped make the cramped abandoned subway car feel almost like a forest-- as though those even existed anymore anyway-- and helped the filtration system they’d built neutralize the pacifying smog otherwise ubiquitous throughout RL Neo-Seoul. 

So far as they knew, what little natural forest was left anymore was still off the grid, but like everyone else within the city’s hazy limits, neither Minzy nor Bom had ever even been out of Neo-Seoul to see it. Only Minzy’s doctored phosphorescent enriched-nitrogen fertiliser kept the little evergreens growing in the thin dirt, without Virtual augmentation. CL liked the look of them, so she had altered the compromised simulation codes and managed to expand the illusion of their riotous growth to every corner of the lab when they had confirmed the integrity of their plan’s barest bones.

“CL’s gonna be pissed if you can’t crack the new Virtual Paradise drug formula by the end of the week,” Minzy said. She tested the balance of her mixture with a hand-held substance-testing kit bought over the counter with RL cash, watching for a particular color sequence to flash and the data, condensed into a QR code on the kit’s cheap flex-screen.

Bom made a sound through her nose and grimaced, typing and then erasing code. “If CL has a problem with how long I’m taking, she can do it herself,” she said. But she expanded the center ring on her holoscreen and began to work again. “The whole thing is on lockdown since the last incursion. They’ve got the best encryption AI money can buy, and all you’ve got is me.” She waved her hand up and the holoscreen fizzled out in a shower of pixels again.

A neatly manicured hand dropped onto her shoulder. “And you’re the best encryption-slash-entertainment AI money can’t buy,” CL said. “Crack the drug formula, and we can use an active access-chip to get into the VR. That’s all it takes for Virtual Paradise to be as good as crashed.”

“That’s _all_ it takes,” Bom said, despite Minzy’s grin.

* * *

Dara stood by her boyfriend’s bed, staring at his thin form. At the Reality Passport system electronically locked against his temple and wrapped around his face. His dark eyes (glittering with laughter, as they laced their fingers together) stared blankly up at the thin flexiglass screen passing information from the RealPass to his optic nerves.

Seo-joon hadn’t looked at her in months. Every time he stepped out of the Virtual Paradise system he ate (happily, enjoying the food she made even when they didn’t have much) mechanically, and never enough. He’d always been a lean guy, but she could feel his bones when she leaned down to touch his arm. He didn’t so much as twitch at her touch.

She ran her hand up his arm, feeling skin that seemed fragile and damp. It didn’t used to be like this, with him staring into a fantasy that she had no place in. They used to go out, scrimping to have little picnics in unfinished buildings, imagining a better future for themselves. They had imagined a sort of future where they and people like them could be together, connecting through every experience they shared, not realizing then that people were already being seduced away from reality by the idea of what reality could be.

But maybe this really was _his_ “better future”-- using what money he had to hide from the fear and uncertainty in a paradise that was more perfect than reality. Her hand lingered on the RealPass and then dropped. She put her hands in her pockets instead. Her fingers were cold.

* * *

Minzy pulled down an empty canister, making sure that it was properly sealed before she attached the siphon tube. “All I’m saying,” she said as she turned on the pump, ”is that we could probably find someone who is about to have a heart attack, and get the chip from them.”

“Too risky,” said Bom, who had finally moved away from the center table to make some tea using an old-model bunsen burner. “If we did it wrong, it would fry out the chip and set an alert on the code, so we’d be marked the moment we moved into the RealPass landing. Those are not security measures you want to mess with. I’m talking burn out your neural pathways serious.”

“Then we find a defector. Someone who used to do Virtual Paradise and has sworn off,” Minzy said. “I know that kind of access is supposed to be your birthright-- coderight, buildright -- whatever,” she waved her hand as though her companion’s opinion on Artificial Intelligences accessing secret corporate networks made no sense to her, “but we still have to find a human whose chip we can use.” She nervously ran her chipped nails over the seal a second and third time before reaching up to turn the gas on.

“One who’s willing to let us murder them so that we can wipe everything? That might be a hard sell for most humans.” Bom poured the tea into three cups, even though her AI-hardshell didn’t actually let her drink it. She tended to make tea as a nervous habit. CL’s AI-hardshell was a newer model so when Bom passed her a cup, she took a polite sip.

CL put the cup down, though, and went back to misting a plant as she listened to her compatriots bicker over the best way to get the active in-execution codes off of a RealPass chip. They could only be be activated _after_ the RealPass was attached to a living human, which meant Minzy was the only one actually eligible and she had no intention of “getting pacified like livestock”, whatever that meant. And, anyway, in order to clone the data, it needed to be removed mid-information stream. Unfortunately, as all Virtual Paradise users knew well, removing the RealPass midstream had a 73% mortality rate. They needed Bom’s chemistry skills, so it wasn’t as though they could just forcibly attach the RealPass to her, even if CL didn’t already have affection for the woman.

Still, since CL and Bom’s neural networks were permanently barred from Virtual Paradise, a chip was their best way to mask their traces and smuggle themselves and their weapons into a position to do damage. Which led to Bom and Minzy discussing the best way to get a chip without personally murdering someone in their bed.

Sighing, CL put the mister down and picked up a crowbar as she headed for the door. “I’m going to take a walk. Don’t kill any humans without telling me, okay."

* * *

Dara slammed the door. Seo-joon wouldn’t notice, but it made her feel a little better to hear it clang against the frame. Fine. If he wasn’t going to care about their apartment or their life, then why should she? He was barely there at all. Why should she care about him anymore? He clearly didn't care about her, or their life together, or any of the plans they'd made, or the things he'd promised her, or... 

She bit down on a sob, and pressed the heels of her hands against her eyelids until she saw sparks. it didn't really help the way her eyes burned, but at least it gave her an excuse that wasn't that ghost of a man.

Dara took the stairs down from her third floor apartment slowly, relishing and hating the distance the farther she got from her boyfriend's unmoving body lying on what used to be _their_ bed.

The giant holo-billboard for Virtual Paradise floating forty meters up met her gaze as she stepped out of the building and turned to look at the skyline. The billboard was tinted in oil-slick shades, promising colors greater than any seen in a city with a sky so flat grey. Dara sucked in a breath and stared at it a long moment, feeling as though if she turned away from it, it would swallow her up. Her throat tightened so that she could barely breathe, and it seemed like the world was muffled.

The billboard blitzed out suddenly in a spray of unintelligible pixels. It reformed quickly, but blitzed again, jumping from fully-formed image to a holographic kaleidoscope before burning out in a flash of white. Dara couldn't say she was hated its sudden disappearance. She sucked in a full breath, and tried to refocus, and decide where to go from here to move on.

A clanging sound caught her attention, and after a thought, she realized it had been going on for quite some time. It was a solid, intermittent sound, like something hard and metal hitting something metal and significantly less hard. With a final crunch, the sound stopped and Dara hurried around the corner, more curious than she probably ought to be about a sound like that. Before her, staring with a wide-eyed, flushed gaze at one of the district's municipal circuit boxes was a woman leaning heavily on a crowbar. The box was in shards, and the woman threw her bright plume of golden hair back out of her face, glaring at it like every fragment had personally offended her.

* * *

He still lay, unnaturally silent, not twitching or snoring, or anything she was used to seeing from his sleeping form. The longer she looked at him, the more she saw a wax figure, or a mannequin, an emptiness that indicated he may be a corpse already. It was a terrible thing, she thought. But her eyes burned and her fingers burned, and all of her burned to grab the RealPass and jerk it off of him. Maybe he'd be in the small percent of people who would survive the loss. 

But he already seemed so fragile.

She could turn her back on everything. On him, just be gone when he woke up next, as though he would even notice through the Virtual Paradise drug-and-VR-induced haze. On CL, her lion’s eyes and mane; the queen of a rebellion Dara didn’t know she needed-- and the crazy scheme to destroy the company which had ruined her life, the lives of so many damn people in this damn, dull grey city. She could just take a bus as far out of the city as she could manage, and become one of the thousands of people who just disappeared one day.

Or she could… destroy the one thing that she had clung to until it was in tatters, her one last real dream, in service to the ideals of one crazy, brilliant _free_ woman. A woman who might just be lines of code in a metal and plastic body, but was so much more real than anyone-- anyTHING Dara had ever experienced before. When she looked at CL, she felt like the world was falling away, unfolding into the bare skeleton of what it should be so that she and CL could rebuild into something better, something with neon lights and color and crazy patterns.

Her hand lifted, dropped. She fought herself, trying to turn and just walk away. Her hand lifted, caught hold of the RealPass, and pulled.

* * *

“We have access to the chip,” CL said. Her smile was triumphant and she leaned against the wall, letting the broad leaves of Minzy’s plants brush her shoulders. “I can get us into Virtual Paradise.” She leaned over Bom’s shoulder and tapped on the holoscreen. “Look.” The chip’s statistics blinked into being and Bom pursed her lips thoughtfully, leaning into CL’s heat.

“It’s only a basic chip. Seo-joon didn’t have the money for anything fancy,” Dara started, and stuttered to a stop when Minzy waved her hand.

“If we can get into Virtual Paradise, I promise you that we can get anywhere from the entrance hall. Trust Bom’s skills. She will sing this fire into being.” Her smirk seemed as a big as a shark’s grin. “And once we turn the failsafes off, we’ll have an entire cyber-mob willing to tear the place apart.” Her hands moved quickly as she combined a variety of fizzy, off-colored chemicals together. She didn’t seem at all bothered by liquid’s excitable quality-- her hands were already stained green and brown where the drug’s violent explosions sent splatters across her arm.

Bom nodded slowly. She didn’t really look up. Her expression was cool, as though unexcited by Dara’s contribution, but Dara could almost feel the static charge that she was giving off. She seemed, Dara thought suddenly, like a panther. She wasn’t going to move until she could move precisely, but her spare motion belied a universe of electricity waiting to be unleashed. “This is as near as I’ve ever come to seeing the chip uncorrupted by impulse feedback. I can disguise myself as part of the program-- that is, the forum landing’s entertainment AI. Once in…”

Cutting in, CL said, “once in, we smash up the place, destroy the avatars sitting in their little perfect white stasis and blow the servers to bits.” She poked at a button on Bom’s screen, earning her a quick, irritated look and light swat on the wrist.

“What happens to the people still connected to their RealPass?” Dara asked. She wrapped her arms around herself, and tried to convince herself she was shivering with cold and not excitement. Her pulse fluttered when CL stood straight and moved towards her, expression intense.

Minzy’s experimental drug popped once, loudly, startling everyone but Minzy, who just grabbed a sheet tray and began pouring the suddenly viscous liquid onto it. The other three paused to watch the greyish sludge shiver and turn a violent pink as it spread. 

After a moment, CL took Dara’s hand. “They get a choice-- either they take up with our avatars and help us light the place up, or Bom resets the whole thing and boots them out of the system. Either way, they’ll be purged of the haze and off of the system for good.” Dara’s hand squeezed shut convulsively around CL’s. CL smiled.

“And then,” said Bom, who waved her hands, shutting the screen down, “CL and I? We set that damn thing on fire from the inside out.”

Dara met Minzy’s eyes, and then Bom’s. CL’s presence was the kind of heat Dara had once dreamed about living alongside, vibrantly inhabiting herself every moment. The two AIs-- Bom with her even expression and CL with her wildfire flashes-- and Minzy, staring absently at her tray of slowly congealing drug, _these_ were the women who were alive, and Dara’s chest pounded.

Dara slowed down a helpless giggle and watched CL’s eyes widen and her cheeks color. Together, in their shared gaze, Dara suddenly understood the fire that the four of them could kindle together.


End file.
